The present invention relates to physiological image registration and fusion, and more particularly, to fusing multiple medical images of anatomical structures using physiological models of related structures.
Various imaging modalities, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), ultrasound, positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), etc., are used to generate medical images of anatomic structures. The physiological information provided by various types of imaging modalities is often vital throughout a clinical workflow, which includes diagnosis, planning, and evaluation of surgical and radio-therapeutical procedures. Information gained from two or more images acquired using different imaging modalities is often complementary, and can provide additional and critical clinical value. Thus, methods for integrating such information from different imaging modalities are desirable.
Conventional techniques for registering different images utilize image-based methods in which a measure of similarity if defined together with a set of allowed rigid/non-rigid transformations and optimization is used to maximize the similarity measure subject to the allowed transformations. Such a similarity measure, applied in multi-modal registration, is typically based on mutual intensity information in the images. Mutual intensity information becomes very complex for high dimensional multi-modal registration problems, which leads to long processing time and poor results. Accordingly, although conventional registration techniques have achieved limited success in two-dimensional mono-modal and widely rigid anatomical regions, such techniques have not been widely adopted in multi-modal registration of higher dimensional images.